Save your souls,” says Charles Kingsley, “each man his own dirty soul for himself.” Those are strong words for a parson, and yet the man who used them was the most earnest parson we have had in England for a good many years. I have quoted them at the beginning of this article because they are the best possible summing up of the teaching of “the Salvation Army.” “But what is the Salvation Army?” your readers will inquire. It is “General” the Rev. William Booth. It is “the Christian Mission.” It is “the Hallelujah Lasses.” Or, in brief, it is the most extraordinary body of revivalists that has been known for this century or more. In a little book which I contrived to get hold of last night its objects are described as being “to seize the slaves of sin, and not only set them free and turn them into children of God; but, as far as possible, in each case to make them soul-winners.” Now, I have mingled with most religious bodies in my time. I have attended “Ranters’” chapels; I have taken part in camp meetings; I have mixed up with Johanna men, and have listened to most recent revivalist preachers, from Richard Weaver to “Happy Sam.” But though I have heard of the Salvation Army and the Hallelujah Lasses every day for the last six months, I kept clear of the because I don’t particularly care for religious pantomimes. However, curiosity is sometimes too strong even for a special correspondent who has other duties to attend to. I had witnessed unmoved mighty processions through the streets of Newcastle. I had seen Hallelujah Lasses marching backwards, and beating time with an umbrella to the very inharmonious singing of certain detachments of the army. I had gone past certain public halls in this town and the sister borough, and had found them crammed to the doors. But all this time I was insensible to temptation. What did fetch me, however, was an advertisement which appeared in your columns on Saturday. There I read that on that day, at three p.m., “Mrs Booth would present colours to nine newly formed corps;” that “all corps would parade with colours” on the Sandhill on Sunday morning; that, on the same day, there would be “services in the Tyne Theatre and Hall of Varieties, conducted by the General; and in the Circus, conducted by Captain B. Booth, from Manchester, with his Hallelujah Fiddle”; and that Mrs Booth “would be present in Gateshead Town Hall, and Mr. Bramwell Booth, with the Giant Doctor, in Handyside’s Hall, Gateshead, and seven Hallelujah Lasses, led by the One-eyed Captain, in the Bottle Bank Music Hall.” That was really too much. My curiosity was a great deal too strong for me; and I determined to be present at as many of these “services” as possible. I must confess that I have a sort of delicacy about writing on the “Salvation Army.” In a book called “Rules and Regulations,” issued for the instruction of the officers - a book which I can only describe as the most worldly and un-Christianlike compilation that I ever saw - I find these instructions to “Field Officers”:- “Notices in newspapers of any kind are always of great service. Editors, if requested, will often insert paragraphs calling attention to advertisements sent. There are often correspondents, ‘local gossips,’ &c., whose business it is to collect and write in a taking way, reports on novelties, entertainments, &c., &c. Such men can often be got hold of by a little enquiry, and, on learning how peculiar our services are, they will for the paper’s sake, often insert long notices. It is well worth while to take pains, and even spend a little money, if needs be, in obtaining such notice, for even if they write violently against us, the result is increased attendance and benefit.” Now it must appear to all persons who believe in the morality of a book like this that because I am writing of the Salvation Army, I have been “got hold of,” and that “a little money” has been expended to induce me to put my pen to paper. Hence my delicacy about the matter. However, I leave my readers to form their own conclusions about these things. It appears to me that a person who was capable of writing the sentences I have quoted required to make a very vigorous effort to “save his own dirty soul for himself.” I only hope that he has succeeded.
Let me say this much for the Salvation Army. It represents the biggest revivalist movement that I have known in my time. That is a great deal to say after one has witnessed the excitement created by Messrs. Moody and Sankey. It is quite true, nevertheless. Why, at the Circus on Saturday night, there were detachments from various parts of Northumberland, Durham, and North Yorkshire. The corps to which colours were presented came from Blyth, from Bedlington, and from other towns in the district. There had been no regular presentation of colours before. The Consett division seemed to be the only corps which was entitled to carry a banner before it. Now, most of the regiments in the district will march with a flag which has a sun burning in the centre, and which carries the extraordinary motto, “Blood and Fire.” The Council of War at the Circus on Saturday evening was quite an exceptional affair. Only soldiers of the Salvation Army were supposed to be present. Admission was by ticket; yet the place was crowded. The space behind the platform was banked up with faces; the “ring” was a dense mass of human beings. Galleries, boxes, promenades, all available spaces, indeed, were closely packed. A more motley gathering was seldom witnessed. The Moody and Sankey movement reached the middle and the working classes; the Established Church mission touched the class above those; the Salvation Army has been recruited from the gutter, or from the “residuum” of which Mr. Bright speaks when he says that there is one class which must be left outside even of universal suffrage. When I entered the circus I felt that I was amongst strange people. Fortunately, I had the advantage of a cicerone who “knew the tragic heart of towns.” He had laboured amongst the lowest poor. The Gallowgate slums were as familiar to him as a verse of the Bible; and he knew the character of the most desperate persons in the town as well as the police-books. “The Salvation Army,” he said, “has reached a class that I never knew to be reached before. The other night I saw a man who had spent twenty years in prison actually creep up to the platform, scarcely daring to show himself, or to acknowledge that he had been moved. That man over yonder, with the shock head and the broad face was the most violent scamp in Gallowgate, and now he is ‘clothed and in his right mind.’ On the platform there are men known as ‘the wrestler’ and ‘the runner.’ One was the champion light-weight; the other was the best man in a one mile race. The man with a wand is a quarryman who was noted for his drunkenness and his violence; the other standing up in the centre, there, had sixteen pounds worth of goods in pawn when he was converted.” So talked my cicerone, lending quite an exceptional interest to what was very like a noisy entertainment. How the persons who were on the platform contrive to influence anybody, I can’t quite make out. With one exception, their speeches and their actions may be fairly described as mindless. The “General,” who was the most prominent figure, is a tall, grey, hooked-nosed man, addicted to strange gesticulations and rambling methods of speech. Of all revivalist preachers whom I have ever seen he appeared to be the least promising; yet whilst he was speaking the “Hallelujah Lasses” moved backwards and forwards with folded arms, cried “Bless the Lord” and “Amen,” and appeared to be enjoying themselves to an incomprehensible extent. The excitement was kept up by singing. With singing the meeting commenced; singing filled up all interstices between prayers, and exhortations, and speeches about the history of the army. Everybody sings - out of tune - in the lustiest voice he can command, and with an enthusiasm to be witnessed nowhere else. You shall see a man with the face of a real blackguard, if there ever was one, bellowing out with his arms folded and his eyes turned up to heaven, as if he had never been accustomed to anything else but shouting, “I’m going home to glory.” Mere vociferation and gesticulation is not enough for many of those who are present. One man, because he has a knack of jumping up into the air every few minutes, has to be held down to his seat by his friends. Another makes the place resound with his perpetual “Hallelujahs.” A woman in the gallery dances and waves her handkerchief every few minutes, and no sooner sits down than she springs up again as if she had sat on a pincushion. Almost everybody is extraordinarily and indescribably eccentric. There is no feeling of solemnity about the business; none of the ordinary impressiveness of religious services. You may laugh or cheer, or shout or dance, and everything is taken as a “manifestation of the spirit.” The gathering at the Circus on Saturday, however was not an ordinary meeting. It was a muster of converts who had assembled to see a great ceremony; which was commenced after much singing and praying and wringing of hands. A man appeared at the side of the platform with a number of flags - red, with a blue border, and a large star in the centre. By and bye, Mrs. Booth, the wife of “the General,” came forward, took one of the flags in her hand, waved it before the audience, and explained of what it was emblematical. At the conclusion of a long speech she called on the “captain” from Bedlington, a pale, thin young woman, who took the flag, made a short speech to the audience, and took a sort of oath to bear the banner for “the Lord’s sake.” This ceremony was gone through nine times, nine female “captains” receiving banners from the wife of “the General” amid the vociferations of the vast audience, which seemed to experience a religious delight in being noisy. After the presentation there was more singing and praying, followed by a long interval of hand-shaking, and the company separated, to gather again out of doors, and march through different parts of the town with the new banners flying in the breeze.
If Charles Mackay ever revises his work on “Epidemic Delusions; or the Madness of Crowds,” he should incorporate some notice of the Salvation Army. This strange religious movement has every characteristic of an epidemic, contagion not being excepted. There have been similar things before, but not recently. A preaching mania once spread itself through a great part of Europe. At another time there was a dancing mania; and at still another, a prophesying mania. The converts of the Salvation Army seem to combine all these eccentricities. The scene at the Sandhill on Sunday morning was most extraordinary. That spot, sacred through the week day to business, and on Sunday to political speech-making and polemical theology, was completely taken by storm by the Salvation Army. As one detachment after another marched up to the singing of hymns, one might hear the ordinary frequenters of the place asking “What will become of the cobbler?” “How will Geordie make himself heard this morning?” It was a hard fight for a long time. There are two rolleys on the Sandhill which serve the purpose of Sunday platforms. One is usually devoted to politics or religion and the other to teetotalism. The Sandhill orators claim a kind of property in them, and resent any rivalry, even from the leaders of the Salvation Army. On this particular morning their followers made sure of one rolley; but the other was taken by a great coup of “the General” and his field officers, who marched to the assault with flags flying and drums beating, or I should have said, with fiddles playing. The position once gained, the flags were held up aloft, the “Hallelujah fiddle” was waved in the air, and a glad shout announced that the “Army” had gained one more victory. The struggle was a desperate one for a long time. The Sandhill orator is never deficient in lungs; and the occupants of one rolley bravely shouted against the occupants of the other. However, the besieged had to give way before the force of numbers. “The General” not inaptly compared his army to the Zulus. It conducted the attack in something like the fashion of warfare adopted by our savage enemies in South Africa. The “horns of the army” closed in from the Low Bridge on one side, and from the Quay on the other. The “breast of the army” filed down the Side, Then the whole of the contingents were massed together, with “the Hallelujah Giant” in the middle; and the Sandhill orators were, for the time being, like Hereward’s men in the isle of Ely, “captive but unconquered.” For some time the struggle was waged around the two rolleys; but it was a vain warfare. The orators shouted against the preachers, the Home-Ruler against the converted sweep; but the army silenced all opposition by singing lustily, if also somewhat ungrammatically -